How business are going further to make international supply chains work for smallholder farmers

Publication by the Fairtrade Foundation

This paper comes at a time when there is increasing recognition among business and government in the role smallholder farmers can play in a truly sustainable food and farming system. For the past thirty years it has been hard for smallholder farmers and their partners to challenge the assumption that urbanisation of population and the industrialisation of agriculture are the only pathways for development and this view was a major cause of the erosion of the technical, financial and marketing services on which smallholder farmers depended.

These assumptions are still prevalent in many countries but there is growing interest in an alternative and the feedback from commercial stakeholders surveyed for this report indicates a greater shared perspective on the major global sustainability challenges, including the need for social and environmental justice, than at any time since the ‘Fairtrade mark’ was launched in 1994.